We’ve discontinued Userbin,
to continue the journey as Castle

Back in 2013 when we started building Userbin, we did it entirely out of our own experience. As developers, user authentication and management was something we had struggled with for many years, and we saw the need for a product that would make this process not only smooth, but also secure.

We set off to create an authentication solution that would detect the use of stolen passwords, offer deep insight over who was using your service, and automatically block and notify user accounts at risk.

The first version of Userbin saw the light at LAUNCH Festival 2014. After four hectic days of pitching, we went out touring San Francisco and the Valley for two months. We tried to meet as many developer as possible, getting them to try out our product and listened to their feedback. We were excited over how well the product was received and that developers seemed to be all thrilled about the security features. However, there was this thing that kept on nagging us – developers started to cringe as soon as they realized that they would first have to upload all their user data to our cloud. Showstopper alert!

Initially we thought this was just a trust issue. That we would convince them eventually as we’d gain more credibility. We knew from our research, that there were already this whole bunch of companies who had paved the way building cloud-based single-sign on (SSO) for enterprises.

However, what we were yet to realize, is that enterprise SSO looks to solve an utterly different problem – employees at enterprise companies come and go, and it’s a real mess to manage access to peripheral systems. A solution to this problem saves a lot of time and money, whereas our authentication solution was merely cutting implementation time at the very start of a project.

When finally coming to that conclusion, we saw that Userbin was essentially made up by two different products – user authentication, and fraud prevention. And the adoption of the latter unfortunately being greatly slowed down by the first one.

In late 2014 we decided to focus all our efforts exclusively on the fraud prevention layer. To really make this happen we also raised a round of capital which will enable us to build the team and the product we've visioned for the last couple of years – Castle.